The Naked and the Red

P-D:  St. Charles County authorities investigating deaths

That’s a new one on me — cops start asking questions when a dead body shows up.

CNS:  White House Says Economy Is Sound Despite ‘Mess’

“And if you take out the murder rate, Washington D.C. is a safe city.” — Marion Barry

CNS:  Bristol Palin’s Ex-Fiance Hopes to Reunite Some Day

By some strange coincidence, he’ll go back to her in about seventeen and a half years.

AFP:  Naked Spaniards in seal-cull protest

Why is it that stupid lib thinks that being naked is going to do any good?  If just being naked cured social problems, I’d take off all my clothes right away.

KVFS-12:  Obama jokes the GOP wants him to get lost

It’s no joke — I think he’s already lost.

AP:  Fewer teens sniffing inhalants to get high

They’re getting high the good ole fashioned way, by smoking it.

LiveScience:  Trend: Daughters Follow Dads’ Footsteps

Not a good idea if you’re the daughter of Osama bin Laden, Ron Jeremy, Kurt Angle, or Pol Pot.

LiveScience:  Teen Dinosaurs Got into Trouble

Daddy T-Rex ripped his boy a new one (literally) if he wasn’t inside the cave before curfew.

Reuters:  Fish may be brain food for teenage boys

If you’re a teenage boy, and your parents have made reservations to Red Lobster every night this week, now you know why.

Reuters:  Tupac’s mother files cross-suit over film project

She’s worried that people might found out how she raised such a thug.

AFP:  Czech man shamed in handcuff hazard

He cuffed himself and came to the police station.  Give him some credit for doing part of the job by himself.

On the Losing End

Local yokel California conservative talk radio is on the decline.  A combination of the bad economy and the Mexicanization of the state and therefore declining white population has forced stations to dump local conservative talkers for nationally syndicated ones.  That, of course, is merely an intermediary step, on the way to these stations becoming Spanish language.

The John and Ken show on KFI (the most listened to talk radio station in the country) is one of the last few successful local hosts in Cali.  God love ‘em, but they’re fighting a losing battle, being in that big northern suburb of Tijuana.

“Higher than West Africa, and On Par With Uganda and Parts of Kenya”

That is the reaction of Washington, D.C.’s city AIDS czar, on the news that 3% of District residents have HIV or AIDS.  Seven percent of D.C’s black men have it, as well as 10% of all D.C. residents in their forties.

Washington, D.C., West Africa, Uganda and Kenya.  What’s the commonality?

As Long As We’re All Equal

Two law profs at Pepperdine University, evidently fuming over the fact that it looks like California’s Prop 8 is going to stand, are floating the proposal that governments stop recognizing marriages.  After all, if gays can’t have it, then nobody can.

While it’s tempting from a libertarian perspective, I think almost everyone, including most libertarians, know in their heart of hearts that a society that sanctions marriage and only heterosexual marriage is qualitatively better.

Grudge Match in ConnetiNUT

Why is there an outbreak of now-illegal cockfighting matches in Waterbury, Connecticut?  There’s probably more cockfighting after it became illegal than before.  How can such a thing be happening in the most enlightened and progressive region of the country, where a Republican dare not trod?

The Boston Globe provides unusually frank answers:

Located at the intersection of Interstate 84 and state Route 8, Waterbury finds itself easily accessible to people from Boston, New York, Worcester, and Springfield. And some cockfighting fans have certainly been making the trip. The people arrested at Waterbury cockfights hailed from 26 communities in four states, including Massachusetts.

“Almost all of them are from out of town, which is a bigger concern for me because how do they find out about it?” asked J. Paul Vance Jr., president of Waterbury’s Board of Aldermen. “How is it being advertised? And how do we shut these people down?”

Perhaps more important than Waterbury’s geography are its demographics. The city’s population, about 108,000, has remained stagnant for nearly 50 years as the brass industry and other manufacturers have shut down. Yet since 1970, Waterbury’s Hispanic population has grown nearly eightfold, according to US Census data, from around 3,900 to nearly 30,000.

Hispanics now account for more than one-fourth of the city’s population. The vast majority of them hail from Puerto Rico, where cockfighting is legal. That more than anything might explain what’s happening, said Alderman Albert Negron, whose father moved from Puerto Rico to Connecticut in the 1960s. Most of the people arrested in the raids have been Hispanic.

“We have Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and in all their countries of origin, that’s a national pastime,” Negron said.

Now all those good ConnetiNUT libs are in a Catch-22.  Their love of animals is itself in a fight up against their worship of diversity and sincere desire never to be “racist” by enforcing any kind of antiquated and bigoted “border” between whites and non-whites.  Which rooster is going to win that bout?  I can tell you this much, it’s going 15 rounds.

Bye Bye Minot, Hello Bangalore

AFP:

US firm to close branch due to lack of employees

TAMPA, Florida (AFP) – A Florida-based firm will soon close one of its North Dakota offices for a reason that seems unfathomable during the deepening US recession: it can’t find enough employees to hire.

Sykes Enterprises, which specializes in creating and maintaining computer customer care services for corporations, opened a telephone call center in Minot, North Dakota in 1996. Last May, management wanted to increase the number of employees to 450.

Yet an unexpected thing happened: so few people applied for the Minot jobs that the Tampa-headquartered company will have to close the call center on May 10 — a cutback by Sykes that will result in 200 people losing their jobs.

“We’ve been working for several months there (in Minot) to find enough applicants for the work, since we have been experiencing significant growth in the US,” said Sykes spokeswoman Andrea Burnett.

She also told AFP that Sykes advertised for many months in the local Minot electronic and press media for applicants.

Really?  You did?  What did you do, run a 5-second TV ad on a Sunday night infomercial aired on Minot’s lowest-rated TV station, or a 10-second radio ad on an overnight rerun of Pinko McFarland’s Hog Talk, or a 2-point classified on page Q45 of the Sunday edition of the Minot newspaper?  Advertising minimum wage jobs, no less?

And why does your supposed inability to hire 450 more people mean that the 200 Minotians who work in that call center have to lose their jobs?

It was something like that, specifically generated to create a low applicant base, so that the company could use that as an excuse to move those open jobs and by deduction the 200 existing jobs to Bangalore, based on the pretense that no Americans wanted to do those jobs.  Call centers are ripe for this kind of treachery.

Preponderance of the Economic Frustration

White House wants to halt the granting of some $165 million (though what’s a million dollars these days?) of bonuses due to AIG execs.  AIG responds by saying that the bounuses are in their employment contracts, and they could sue if AIG doesn’t pay.

I say don’t pay and let ‘em sue.  Good luck in this near-depression economy of ours finding nine out of twelve random people who’ll say that people making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year if not millions should get $165 million more, when at least some of those civil trial jurors are out of jobs and the ones that still have jobs are taxpayers helping to bail out AIG.

UPDATE 3/17: But I think the demagoguery and invective on the part of some Washington politicians (yes, Charles Grassley, I mean you) is getting to be too much.  AIG’s execs are posting armed guards at their offices.

No need to mouth off and fuel the flames of hate and jealousy, just don’t pay them their bonuses.  Yes, they’ll sue, but like I said, in this economy, you’re not going to get a civil court jury to side with you.  And there is a chance that the AIG execs might sue any politician of serious stature, who says that AIG shouldn’t pay their bonuses, and sue them for tortious interference of contract.  But again, find 9 out of 12 people who would side with AIG execs.

No Joy in Obamaville

Well well.  I’m looking at this thing the call a “bracket” this morning, and Oregon State isn’t in it.  Gee, is their new basketball coach doing for Beavers hoops what his brother-in-law is doing for the country?  Enjoy your trip to the NIT, and your NITwit brother-in-law.

And Go Mizzou.

AntiNeoConfedratago Delenda Est

Hey, Eddie Haskell.  You just walked right into a mousetrap.

Oh yeah, you might have gotten your piece of cheese, but there’s a piece of metal that just sprang loose.

You think you were being so clever and such a know-it-all when you lash out at the Mother Ship over who the Carthaginians were, but you just admitted that they were white.  Which is the whole point.

Eddie Haskell:  Has the Southern Poverty Law Center hired you yet?  Don’t get too down in the dumps if they haven’t, I know you’ve been waiting for years to get that call from Montgomery, Alabama, and as I noticed that the sexy Donna Shalala look-alike links to you from the blog she maintains for the SPLC, hopebama is not lost.